Cancer treatments which target several pathways within cancer cells have been developed recently. However, some type of cancers exhibit different known or unknown pathway disruptions or develop treatment resistance. Thus, these cancer treatments are limited since they do not cause cell death in these types of cancer cells and are ineffective at treating various type of cancer.
Accordingly, there is a need to develop new approaches and drugs that will be suitable for effective and efficient treatment of cancer and targeting various type of cancer. In this way, it has been suggested that characterization of new therapeutic compounds in cancer inducing cell death through membranolysis of cancer cells may be highly desirable.
AAC-11 is an antiapoptotic protein (antiapoptosis clone 11) (Tewari et al., 1997), also called Api5 or FIF (Morris et al., 2006; Van den Berghe et al., 2000). AAC-11 is a nuclear protein whose expression has been demonstrated to prevent apoptosis following growth factor deprivation (Kim et al., 2000; Tewari et al., 1997). AAC-11 antiapoptotic action appears by the suppression of the transcription factor E2F1-induced apoptosis (Morris et al., 2006). The AAC-11 gene has been shown to be highly expressed in multiple cancer cell lines as well as in some metastatic lymph node tissues and in B cell chronic lymphoid leukemia (Clegg et al., 2003; Kim et al., 2000; Krejci et al., 2007; Morris et al., 2006; Sasaki et al., 2001; Tewari et al., 1997; Van den Berghe et al., 2000). AAC-11 expression seems to confer a poor outcome in subgroups of patients with non-small cell lung carcinoma whereas its depletion appears to be tumor cell lethal under condition of low-serum stress (Krejci et al., 2007; Sasaki et al., 2001). Interestingly, AAC-11 overexpression has been reported to promote both cervical cancer cells growth and invasiveness (Kim et al., 2000). Combined, these observations implicate AAC-11 as a putative metastatic oncogene.
There is no disclosure in the art of AAC-11-LZ-derived peptide effects in cancer, the induction of a rapid cell death through membranolysis of cancer cells and the use of the AAC-11-LZ-derived peptide in the treatment of cancer, and the prevention of metastasis in metastatic cancer.